"You guys skooch in, I have a couple announcements for you," said Ryan McLean as the junior varsity girls swim team at Cherry Creek High School began to paddle in groups to the pool's edge.
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In a moment they would get the low down on that night's team meal, final training sessions before the State Finals and something about proper ways to dress.
That's all expected. What isn't – they were also about to get to know their coach a lot better. That's because McLean was about to give them "the talk."
Perception is reality: three words that can define whether you sink or swim.
McLean describes her "mantra" like this: "Provided that your outlook is good, then your perspective is good and your life is good. Things are the way that they are, because you perceive them that way."
Before she had her mantra, McLean relied more on instinct to stay afloat.
"I'm really fortunate that I was too stupid to realize that I could have had a choice not to swim," said the 27 year old, remembering when she went to sign up for a four year on the Cherry Creek High School swim team 10 years ago.
The previous three seasons, McLean had been a stalwart on a powerful varsity team, a multi-faceted talent, whose specialty was the demanding Individual Medley.
End to end, lap after lap, she exuded the discipline and determination that are the hallmarks of competitive swimmers.
The kids think they know McLean already, and in many ways they do. Theirs is an end to end, lap after lap, day after day pursuit of excellence, just as hers was.
Many of them, as McLean did, may also feel like they are gliding in pre-assigned lanes to the future.
"I was a very naïve junior in high school, who was probably going to be a journalist, or writer or something," her voice trailed off and after a long pause, "maybe a painter."
"I was going to get married and have lots of babies, probably before I was 25; live in suburbia and didn't really see much of, you know, outside of what I was supposed to do, I guess," she said.
That was until Feb. 1, 1997
"It was a group of six of us - we decided at the last minute to go bowling," said McLean.
After her school's annual Snow Ball dance, life didn't take the 180 degree turn she was used to in the pool.
McLean say she still isn't sure what exactly happened. One moment her classmates from Cherry Creek and their boyfriends from Arapahoe High School were driving along C-470 on their way to Littleton and the next, their Suburban was sliding, then rolling, then careening into oncoming traffic, where it hit a minivan, killing its driver, Thomas Butler, and badly injuring his wife and 5-year-old son.
As for the teens in the Suburban, McLean said, "Everybody in our car was injured. The passenger sitting next to me (her boyfriend, 16-year-old Jeremy Bottoms), he was projected out the back of the vehicle. He crushed his skull and he was killed instantly."
"The driver broke her jaw; the front passenger sustained a mild brain injury and some other trauma to his back. Another boy broke his ankle and then another girl had a severe brain injury and ended up in a coma for about three weeks before she came out of it and had to re-learn how to talk walk, eat, all of those things," said McLean.
One of the troopers on the scene described it as the worst of his 27 year career.
McLean wasn't even discovered immediately because she had been pitched off into the blackness and none of the emergency responders knew just how many people had been in that car.
"They weren't even really sure I'd make it past the first night. Broke my back obviously, which is the most outward effect, but I also broke both of my legs, I broke both of my arms, collapsed both of my lungs, both of my hips were broken and so I had a lot of recovering to do," she said.
Many of those injuries would heal, but the damage to her back and resulting injury to her spinal cord left her paralyzed from the waist down.
"I spent from February, all the way to the end of May in the hospital just, you know, learning how to recover," she said.
While learning how to be a paraplegic, she saw all her lost steps.
"Lots of people get stuck in what they're supposed to do. What's the next step? College. Well, what's the next step after that? Getting married. What's the next step after that? Obviously for me, that didn't happen," she said.
Where some would see a life of promise, crushed into confinement, McLean saw a whole new world open up for her.
"Early on, I just felt such a power," she remembered. "Like, 'I've got to be the strong person, because people aren't going to see that in me, just by looking at me.'"
McLean says she realized the water was where her new life would have to begin. So, in her senior year, she did what came naturally.
"Swim season came up my senior year, after I'd been in my accident and I was like, 'I gotta sign up' and I had been in kind of a pool in the rehab place and kind of moved around. But I didn't really know what I was going to becapable of," she said.
It was very apparent that last year's swimming star wasn't anywhere near capable of varsity status anymore.
"I swam on the lowest level Junior Varsity team that year because appropriately, it's where I fit, but it was a real struggle and it was really, really hard, physically and emotionally. I couldn't get myself in and out of the pool by myself. I had a really hard time because I was pretty competitive I knew watching events in meets, where I would place and that was really hard for me. I was swimming probably four times slower than I had the year prior," said McLean.
"I really think that, that was really the start of me realizing that I need to progress from this and I could do, you know, I could develop good things and I can do my own things and you know, I'm really not that limited. And I think that really helped develop a sense of normalcy as well as a sense of, this is my new life."
The old life had been lap after lap in the water. Now, with high school behind her, McLean's new life would complete a lap outside the pool.
"I heard through the grapevine that they needed a coach because one of their coaches didn't show up. Swimming started in a week, so I called my old coach, Eric Craven, and he said, 'Sure, come on, you're hired.' And it was literally that simple."
With her foot back in the place she'd only just left, McLean's easy rapport with students, and particularly swimmers, impressed school administrators. They encouraged her to become a teacher. Several years of learning on the job, as a substitute in the science department, convinced her to go all the way,
"I went back to school, did my student teaching here last year, got my masters and now I'm fully licensed and it's the real deal!" she exclaimed, relieved to know what she'll be doing next year for the first time in a decade.
A science teacher and coach, at Cherry Creek High - not the life path she'd envisioned at 17, but now she's driven by knowing that life is often directed by the lane we choose, not the one assigned.
"Everything in life is there because of the perspective that you have on it," she said.
Back to that moment where the high school girls have come to meet her at the edge of the pool McLean had rolled her wheelchair up to the edge and leaned over as two dozen reflections of her 17-year-old self stared intently back at her.
She gives "the talk" each year, a few days before Snow Ball.
McLean said, "I explain what happened specifically and explain to them that we weren't necessarily doing anything wrong. We didn't have any drugs, alcohol, no really risky behavior, but it still happened. So once you do add those things to the mix you're really tempting fate."
All eyes are locked on the coach and most of them are brimming with tears.
She spares no details of that night. Her boyfriend's death. The dad in the van they hit. What it's like to look into the eyes of your brain damaged friend and see nothing behind them.
It can be a wrenching, even harrowing few minutes for teens, who are good kids, typically riding above the fray, looking out for each other. Not the kind who get into car accidents, become paraplegics, certainly never die. Or so they may have believed.
But, as Ryan wraps up and goes to swim a few laps, as she does every day, the girls get to see something, as valuable as what they just heard.
Their coach flops out of her chair and is freer than she's been all day, stroking away toward the other end.
On the surface, it's easy to see how a swimmer could naturally end up living Mclean's life. However, the kids on the side of the pool get to see what's under the surface, where their coach's dead legs hang, slowing, but never dragging her down. They see three words to live by, when their lanes aren't as clearly marked.
Perception is reality.
